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While
you might have a rock-climbing wall at a sporting goods store, creating
that experience in a catalog is challenging. Cataloger/retailer Orvis
offers fishing school to complement their product offering.
Penzey's
has recipes and end-use photos of dishes using its spices. Gardener's
Supply Co. pulls you in with testimonials and photos of customers who
have used their products. Capturing an experience on a catalog page is
a challenging and worthwhile endeavor.
Experience
happens in many forms. Some 15 years ago I was shopping for a parka
from L.L. Bean. I couldn't decide between size 4 or 6, and the woman on
the phone said, Well honey, why don't you let me send you two, one in
each size. You can send back the one that doesn't fit, I'll send you a
postage paid slip.
That
experience did it for me. Some would say it was good customer service.
I think it was the culture of the company to provide its customers with
good experiences at every opportunity.
I
never stopped thinking that that was the best service I had ever
received. L.L. Bean (who sends me a regular newsletter) now has
multiple experiences available through its Outdoor Discover Schools. I
know I can trust the company to teach me kayaking, fishing, biking,
shooting, and more.
KEVIN KOTOWSKI is president of Olson/Kotowski, a Torrance, CA-based direct marketing agency.
It's
important to note that experiential marketing isn't for everyone. For
starters, your merchandise has to lend itself to it. Second, you have
to commit selling space to make it happen. It's one thing to have
rock-climbing walls in your stores (like outdoor gear merchant REI
does) for customers to experience what it would be like to scale a
mountain; it's another to give up valuable square inches in your
catalog to devote to the experience of using your merchandise.
That
said, two companies that use experiential marketing extremely well and
in two very different ways are Patagonia and J. Peterman.
Patagonia
uses dramatic photos of customers wearing and using its products
outdoors, often in remote locations the viewer can picture himself or
herself experiencing the adventures that fellow Patagonia customers are
having.
J.
Peterman's copy that romances its merchandise places the reader in a
faraway setting such as Hemingway's house in Key West or Picasso's
studio. The reader can, through their mind's eye, experience what it
would be like to be the guest of honor at a Maharajah's banquet or
imagine himself piloting a plane over 1920's East Africa on his way to
visit lsak Dinesen.
What
do Patagonia and J. Peterman, and all experiential marketing efforts,
have in common? They all attempt, by placing the viewer or reader in a
place, setting or situation, to have them aspire to be like the people
they're seeing or reading about. And, of course, they aim to persuade
customers that by wearing or using the marketers' products, they will
be like those people.
So
is experiential marketing right for you? It might be. While it's likely
you can't and shouldn't devote every photograph or copy block to
experiential marketing, it's fine to use a few sidebars in your catalog
to help your customer or prospect experience what it will be like to
use your products.
If
you sell tools, then place the reader in a workshop or garage as a team
prepares a car for an upcoming race. If you sell cooking utensils, then
put them, through photos and copy, in a famous chef's kitchen while he
prepares a gourmet dinner.
But
be cautious. You likely won't see a lift in sales right away. In most
cases, experiential marketing is a branding tactic, not a direct sales
tactic. It takes time and repetition for it to have an effect.
CAROL WORTHINGTON-LEVY is partner, creative services for San Jose, CA-based consultancy Lenser.
Interactivity
and experiential tactics can really serve a marketing need in a very
direct way. For example, television network USA has been developing
games on its Website to keep TV viewers engaged and watching. I notice
that this kind of activity picked up exponentially during the writer's
strike I'm sure to keep the viewer's loyalty while shows were
rerunning for the fifth time.
Google
makes its site as viral and sticky as possible by including a direct
link to YouTube videos, news, weather whatever you want on your
dashboard. For instance, mine has a currency converter.
Catalogers
can get in on the experiential action by inviting catalog customers to
write stories about their successes using the merchant's products. We
can post them, use them for promotion in the catalog, make them part of
a blog, and so on.
But
again, this plays powerfully with our own human interest in telling our
story. People want to be heard and they love to tell a story where they
prevail successfully at the end. It makes them feel good, and it helps
us to tell others why our products are so good.
Even
more traditional direct marketing media such as direct mail can be
experiential. One of my favorite old-fashioned ploys is the liftnote
that offers the reader a chance to write the pros and cons of whether
to join our club or make some other purchase decision. Sometimes they
refer to old Ben Franklin, who used to make decisions that way, so that
the reader will feel they're in good company as they use this technique
to make up their minds.
Direct
mail can be experiential in its approach, but the designer and writer
need to be ready to do the kinds of things that we know people like,
even if everyone looks at us like we're dinosaurs. For example, the
Yes sticker gets many frowns around the table, but it's experiential
and it still works we just beat a 10-year control and that was one of
our elements in the package. Experiential strategies simply need to
appeal to the prospect's interest in responding. Mother Nature made us
curious and tactile and who are we to ignore that?
